Building Better BeaversHow technology is helping Oregon State student-athletes avoid injury and optimize performance.

The ability of sports performance and athletic training staffs to collect data about athletes’ leaps and bounds has improved by … well, leaps and bounds. In the weight rooms and conditioning centers of Oregon State University athletics, technology is now a key player in how Beavers improve strength, flexibility, conditioning and resistance to injury.

Jeff Macy, Oregon State’s associate athletic director for sports performance, has more than a quarter century of experience in strength and conditioning coaching at NCAA Division I schools and the National Basketball Association.

 “What has changed is the ease of use,” he said. Tools are much smaller — in some cases going from the size of a suitcase to something that can be used with a smartphone — and more affordable. They’re wireless.

Women’s basketball player Susana Yepes performs a vertical jump test while Jeff Macy observes.

As a result, the greater volume of data gathered from athletes’ workouts gives the sports performance staff a clearer picture of individuals’ strengths and areas for improvement. Faster data processing also means training regimens can be adjusted more quickly.

Part of training athletes is knowing the physical demands placed on them in practice and competition. One way Macy and his staff used to determine that was timing each drill’s length during practice and estimating its difficulty on a scale of 1 to 10. “That’s how we’d kind of gauge the load we were putting on somebody,” Macy said. 

Now, Beaver football players are outfitted with GPS (global positioning system) tools that track their movements exactly; by the end of a practice session, the sports science staff members have detailed data on each player to share with the coaches. “The data is formatted for them in a way that makes it easier for them to sift through,” Macy said. “They’re hopefully making some adjustments: sometimes at practice kids get tired, we need to pull them out of a couple of drills here or there, or maybe this kid needs more work.”

GPS tools aren’t just for football. “We know how fast a football kid is running, or how many times a basketball kid is changing direction, or how many times a volleyball player is jumping,” Macy said. “We know these things and can much more accurately look at it and go, ‘OK, we know what we need to prepare them to meet the demands of X, Y and Z.’”

Jumping is part of almost every sport. The more explosive the jump and the greater the height or distance, the better; ideally both an athlete’s legs have close to the same level of power. In Corvallis at the P. Wayne Valley Sports Performance Center, force plates serving as jump platforms record the weight being applied to the plate 1,000 times per second.

“By looking at specific metrics of the jump, just a simple vertical jump, we can use it to tell preparation,” Macy said. “Are they ready to perform? Are they recovered throughout the week? Are they using certain techniques to jump where we can train them a different way to help them do it a different way?”

The data collected with these tools can be compared with an athlete’s own previous performance or with that of other athletes.

Deb Graff, OSU’s associate athletic director for athletic training and a member of OSU’s training staff for over 25 years, noted that the Fusionetics software OSU uses captures and assesses movement and can compare it with the norms for young, athletic people, based on data collected from athletes across the country. “It’s not super-super specialized, but it can pick up some outliers and give you places to start to make their program more appropriate for them,” Graff said.

Skyler Thomas, an OSU defensive back going into his senior football season, has experienced technology-gathered data being put to use both during training and when it came time to rehabilitate an injury.

When they do have strong numbers to back that up…they can make our workout that much better.

Thomas participates in teamwide offseason testing of flexibility and mobility to help pinpoint areas of focus for each player’s workouts. After Thomas injured his left knee before the 2023 season, the sports performance and training staffs used strength-testing readings to identify a deficiency in his injured knee, tailor workouts to resolve it and track progress toward its strength readings being equal to or better than the healthy knee.

Thomas said he has “nothing but trust” for the OSU staff, and the data makes that trust even stronger: “When you get here and you start to see that data and you’re like, ‘OK, now I understand why we’re doing this. I understand why we’re doing this movement, I understand why we’re running this much or this fast and all that other stuff ….’ It helps when they do have strong numbers to back that up so they can make our workouts that much better to make us stronger, faster players.”

Macy is able to track data in real time as athletes work on the force plates.

Collecting data from athletes does raise questions, especially in the era of NIL (name, image and likeness). Macy foresees concerns over rights and privacy might eventually become issues. He saw it in his decade working in the NBA and is starting to see questions crop up at the college level, too. “There are some ethical dilemmas,” he said, around “who owns the data and the transparency of it.”

But even as technology becomes increasingly important, he sees one constant: “In the end, motivating young people to do the work is about the same,” Macy said. “Does [the data] motivate this person to do it just a little better? I think those are the big hopes out of all this.”